Teaching Digital System Test

The paper proposes a novel concept of teaching how to test complex digital systems. A set of methods and tools is presented to support laboratory scenarios for test generation and test quality evaluation for microprocessor systems. The scenarios include tasks of test program synthesis and test data generation (separately for data and control parts of microprocessors), and for evaluating test quality in terms of fault coverage. A novel high-level diagnostic model of digital systems in the form of High-Level Decision Diagrams is introduced to make understanding of cause-effect relationships in behavior of systems easier. The presented conception and lab scenarios set up challenges for applying creativity in organizing hierarchical approaches for designing test procedures in the best way to cope with systems complexity. The proposed graph-based diagnostic modeling method makes it easier for students to understand the problems quickly without the need to struggle with huge amount of details in traditional design descriptions. The paper contributes to providing new tools and materials for computer engineering education with the goal to solve innovative system design and test tasks as part of learning and education.